sir_guinglain

Slightly stretched ramblings about a Doctor Who guest star, for The Tides of Time.

Russell T Davies's talk to Worcester College, Oxford and (by invitation of the provost) the Oxford (University) Doctor Who Society was enjoyable. I wasn't in the target audience, of course - there was a lot of talk about how to get into television and how Russell failed to get into the BBC training course three times, ending up by going in as a 'worker' through an ordinary job application and not as management. There was a definite sense of how glad he was to leave Doctor Who and that he spent a long time picking up the threads of his life that he'd dropped to make the series. Nevertheless, despite the attempted interventions of Jonathan Bate, the provost of Worcester - who four years ago encouraged him to persevere with A Midsummer Night's Dream for BBC One when the budget and logistics were collapsing - to take him away, Russell talked to people and posed for photographs for three quarters of an hour. The talk - excluding the Q&A - should appear at the Worcester College website soon if it hasn't already.

As alluded to earlier... Richard Marson's biography of Verity Lambert, first producer of Doctor Who and guiding force behind much, much else, reviewed by me at The St James's Evening Post.

Brief reaction as I have to get up and cross London to the ExCel tomorrow for the 'Celebration'... but it was corny, with some overdone sentiment and dramatised the mythology and communal memory of Doctor Who as much as it did (very selectively) the facts and personalities - but it was still a tremendous achievement within eighty-five minutes, with lots of groans here as dialogue was transplanted or the in-references were made. Shoulder to Shoulder indeed. It annoyed me and tugged at my heartstrings in equal measure. There was some overacting from the principals when in character, particularly during the first recording of An Unearthly Child, but David Bradley was superb.

I'd noticed how recent publicity for the new series of Doctor Who has emphasised its historical settings, with leaks from the set over the last few months revealing that the nineteenth century seems to be visited several times. Just as Doctor Who in 2005 had borrowed imagery and themes from the contemporary aspirational working-class drama genre, in 2012/13 it was borrowing the clothes of the new strand of historical series. Now the blog of The Journal of Victorian Culture, no less, has weighed in with a look at The Snowmen as an item of current neo-Victorianism. Definitely worth a look.

I am too tired to mount an exhaustive exploration of last night's Olympic opening ceremony. I enjoyed it tremendously. It was a self-aware exploration of the force of imagination and narrative in the face of social and economic transformation. The incorporation of 'Flower of Scotland' among the national anthems gained greater resonance as the ceremony progressed, suggesting not conflict between peoples, but resistance to whatever Westminster can throw at the people of Britain altogether. Escorted to Stratford by James Bond, the skydiving sovereign practically became a symbol of authority, political or sporting, as a game of hopscotch on the squares of fiction and reality. The rejection of historical national heroes, with an ambivalent portrayal of Brunel-as-Prospero by Sir Kenneth Branagh as presiding genius, emphasised that this was a pageant of social and cultural history, and Danny Boyle's overhauling (in both senses) of the national stereotypes many across the world no doubt expected to be rehearsed was exhilarating.

ETA: Not Brunel-as-Prospero, but Brunel-as-Caliban. Ambivalence upon ambivalence.

So, farewell then (again) Upstairs Downstairs, after an erratic second season which failed to satisfactorily build on the strenghts of the 2010 miniseries. There are petitioning groups set up on Facebook and Twitter in an attempt to reverse the BBC's decision, but any extension would have to see the direction of the series rethought. From her utterances on Twitter (where she was extremely courteous to my expression of regret), Heidi Thomas appears too exhausted by the job of running UpDown and the much more lauded Call the Midwife to be showrunner for two series at the same time, a reminder that British television series drama seems to rely too heavily on a small pool of talent. UpDown probably lost a valued champion when Piers Wenger left BBC Wales, and the absence of Eileen Atkins and Jean Marsh from this series left a void: though there was much to enjoy, something died with Solomon the monkey.

ETA: Now also at The St James's Evening Post, slightly revised.

Intensive deduction by ITV, guided by the need to extend further a successful franchise, has established that Inspector Morse was once Detective Constable Morse; and so audiences have been transported to 1965 to meet him (in the person of Shaun Evans) investigate his first Oxford case. Morse is one of many coppers transferred from a new town police force to help with the murder of an Oxford teenager, but his doggedness wins him the notice of Inspector Fred Thursday (a lugubrious Roger Allam) and together, as the saying goes, they fight crime. Russell Lewis's script was unadventurous, with Morse and Thursday embroiled among police corruption, the sex industry, the secret service and compromised government ministers; if council housing had been involved this would have been clearly Our Friends in the North Oxford. Even Our Friends's Danny Webb was cast as a police bad apple; but dialogue made the other familiar connection, with Cliveden and the Profumo affair, explicit.

There were a few obvious anachronisms; a street seen through a window displayed what looked like 1990s architecture (specifically, the Lincoln College buildings on Bear Lane) and following up an address in Jericho does not take you to the corner of King Edward Street and Oriel Square, with Oriel College in plain sight if soft focus. I'd have wanted to use the present-day New Theatre as an exterior, with added CGI for the sake of faux-authenticity, but instead a different theatre was used. The Lamb and Flag seemed very much its modern self, complete with pub sign, rather than the more run-down edifice which I first entered in 1988 or whatever it looked like in 1965. A plainer pub sign at least would have helped. In-jokes abounded - Morse's radio is a Zenith, which was the name of the independent production company which made the original Inspector Morse series for the old Midlands ITV contractor Central. The first bus we see is heading to Woodstock (as in Last Bus to...) though that was given an in-story justification. John Thaw's daughter Abigail was cast as an Oxford Mail staffer. Shaun Evans's eyes get to morph into John Thaw's at the end too, which was a bit obvious. As in all latterday instalments of the Morse franchise, the character of the university was simplified to make a tale of elite disdain for the lower orders easier to tell, though I was no doubt not the only viewer who felt flattered by the line that Morse was 'too decent' to thrive at Oxford. I expect this pilot to go to series, though its ending, looking forward twenty years, suggests it would be content with an honourable afterlife prefacing Inspector Morse on download and disc packages.

 

( Eleven hundred words on River Song, the Doctor, marriage, parenthood and the future )

Part one of this review at Dreamwidth and LiveJournal
Part two of this review at Dreamwidth and LiveJournal

 

The last few weeks have largely been concerned in the thinning of the contents of my flat, a task still not done, but there has still been time for some television. Possible spoilers for those wary of such things.

( Wales is insane )

( Your eyes always get piggy when you lie, Moneypenny )

( I will never swim in the sun again... )

( Papers, papers... )